Hollywood Undead’s Johnny 3 Tears Chats About Deleted MySpace Tracks
Last week, musicians around the world received a shock when MySpace announced that about 50 million songs were deleted from the social network. While the social media website’s massive blunder distressed a huge number of performers internationally, the distress felt by many hasn’t gone unrecognized. The colossal deletion error has been approached in a bevy of ways by different musicians. Some have stayed positive and looked at the deletions as an invitation to a new beginning. However, others felt grief-stricken upon learning that their old tracks might never be downloaded again.
A few individuals, including some musicians, felt the huge deletion of tracks may not have been an accident. In fact, a theory emerged that has spread on social media assuming MySpace purposely dumped the music because it cost the social media platform too much money to hold onto all of those old songs. A tech blogger named Andy Baio echoed this claim on Twitter.
“Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists,” Baio tweeted, according to TMZ. “I’m deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than ‘we can’t be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s.'”
Other musicians criticized their peers, saying it was careless for so many to leave their tracks up on MySpace and count on that website to keep holding onto the music. For the lead singer of Devil Wears Prada, Mike Hranica, it was foolish for musicians to expect MySpace to keep so many songs when the website is no longer a popular place for social media. Hranica was surprised that many of his fellow musicians did not back up their songs elsewhere. Hranica’s band only lost one cover song, which he said he and his band really don’t miss. In fact, Hranica felt that losing something old was a bit refreshing.
“It just seems really reckless and foolish to count on MySpace, the most dated platform, to hold something of importance, being your music,” Hranica said, according to Loudwire
Hollywood Undead Frontman Feels Bad for Artists Who Lost Myspace Tracks Add Johnny 3 Tears — singer and bassist of Hollywood Undead — to the list of musicians relieved their old songs have been wiped from Myspace … https://t.co/eWt6skNuOY #entertainment #cosmetics #lifestyle pic.twitter.com/oX1zA9CA5H
— CelebStarzNews (@CelebStarzNews) March 25, 2019
Unlike Hranica, the Hollywood Undead’s lead singer, Johnny 3 Tears, feels terrible for the musicians that lost any amount of their hard work and effort. Some of his band’s demos vanished from MySpace, but those were all old songs that the Hollywood Undead did not care to lose. Unfortunately, that isn’t true for most of the 53 million other tunes from 2003-2015 that MySpace deleted. However, Johnny 3 Tears also feels that MySpace may have purposely dumped the tracks to save money.
“I do feel bad for a lot of artists who were never able to put them down in a studio,” Johnny 3 Tears said, according to Loudwire. “That just doesn’t happen. [MySpace] probably didn’t want to spend money to move them from server to server, or whatever they would’ve had to do…. So they just said, ‘Oh, oops, they’re gone.'”
